A technical failure affecting Microsoft’s platforms on a global scale is causing serious disruption to the operations of private companies and public institutions in Mozambique. Since yesterday afternoon, Thursday (12), thousands of users in the country have been experiencing difficulties accessing email (Outlook) and other essential collaborative work tools, creating a situation of significant disruption to administrative and operational management.
According to reports gathered from local professionals and managers, the inability to send or receive emails, together with intermittent failures affecting Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and the Microsoft 365 suite, has disrupted internal and external communication flows, delaying decision-making processes, payments and public services across various sectors that depend on the digital ecosystem of the US technology giant.
Global impact and causes of the outage
According to information reported by the international news agency Associated Press (AP), the outage began on Thursday and affected tens of thousands of users and organisations around the world, including government infrastructure in Asia, Europe and North America. The monitoring platform Downdetector recorded thousands of complaints worldwide, concentrated mainly on access to Outlook and Exchange Online.
READ: Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot worldwide
In successive technical updates issued over the past few hours, Microsoft explained that the failure was related to an overloaded process responsible for establishing secure connections on its servers. This caused several systems to stop responding to access requests and fail automatic health checks.
The technology company said it had already ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, assuring users that its engineering teams were working to increase server capacity, reroute traffic and gradually restore service stability.
Although some regions of the world have already reported a partial recovery, services remain inaccessible in Mozambique, keeping Information Technology (IT) teams on high alert.
Microsoft’s outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector.
Microsoft says its Exchange Online incident began at 16:17 UTC. Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 17:25 UTC, 12:25 in New York. By 18:25, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against <15 a minute on an average Thursday.
Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level.
Reports did not stay in the Americas. They jumped tenfold in the UK at 17:43, in India at 23:21 local time and in New Zealand at 06:55 local time. Between 17:00 and 18:55 UTC, nearly 3 in 10 reports came from outside the US. We count a country here once its reports reach ten times normal and at least 20 in five minutes.
Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft’s, rose far less.
Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. At 19:38 UTC, reports were still running at more than 11,000 a minute.
— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 12, 2026
Source: Miramar
